Vigilante 8 was made by a small group of five people. Which makes bringing it to PlayStation 1, Nintendo 64 and Game Boy Color impressive. Yes Vigilante 8 beat Twisted Metal to handheld consoles. A lot of people don't know Vigilante 8 series is a spin off of Interstate series by Activision. They knew they had competition on consoles.
Twisted Metal series at this point had 989 Studios making Twisted Metal III & Twisted Metal 4. Both of them sold well enough to get greatest hits rerelease. Their strategy to take it head on was having Vigilante 8 on multiple platforms. Sadly it didn't help much in terms of sells but a lot of people do remember those games.
Personally it is nice to have an alternative to what you are use to in gaming. Sometimes you may prefer a more recently franchise over what you grew up playing. Vigilante 8 is centered around the 70s just like the game it spin off from Interstate '76. I always thought it was interesting to have a school bus on the cover.
There is actually a banned commercial that had a kid cursing. It was banned due to them using a school bus around the time a horrible school shooting happened. Which caused this bus to get changed to a prison bus in the sequel. Just imagine a commercial for a game during the 90s with a kid saying something like that not censored.
Vigilante 8 has eight default playable characters from the start. You have to complete the game to unlock five more characters including Y the Alien. You knew they had to do that joke somewhere in this game lol. What separates this from Twisted Metal series is many things. You don't have to worry running into people or having some of them attacking you.
In some Twisted Metal games you could have people attacking you. Another major difference is choice of music. Twisted Metal is more into metal songs while Vigilante 8 got lighter songs of a few categories. Vigilante 8 also has objectives for every playable character to complete. Yes you can still beat the level simply destroying your opponents.
Some objectives are very easy to complete while others can be tricky to pull off. A perfect example is particular sections of some levels can easily be destroyed. Protection missions is whatever the game tells you to protect make sure it doesn't blow up. In vice versa, it is much easier to do destroying missions.
Also this does include the final opponent at the end of every characters quest mode playthrough. Which means you can still fail in some of them due to what the mission is. I felt some of their levels are too easy while others took me awhile to complete. To fully unlock everything you need to complete every single objective all the characters including Y the Alien.
But if you want to unlock everything without cheating. You have to beat the game with everyone. I also like everyone has a different level selection with different objectives. Yes some objectives are shared but they also do it the opposite direction. I felt this gave me a huge idea how things are going on in this universe.
Vigilante 8 also lets you change the song that is playing. Here is another fact not a lot of people know. This also includes Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense, both of them on PlayStation 1. If you know the method you can play a different music CD while playing them. In other words you can continue playing while listening to other songs to help keep you going.
There isn't many levels but they're all a great size. The final hidden level is Super Dreamland 64 being exclusive to N64 version. Despite the name it has no connection with Nintendo's Kirby. They chose to make it as a parody towards many kid theme games on the console. Vigilante 8 also has different final bosses for every playable characters.
Although two characters face Boogie at the end of their quest mode. You also get arcade and survival modes to spice things up. In survival mode you can play against twelve opponents. Thankfully you aren't facing them at the same time. Yes it is possible to have them all being the same characters. I really would love to see him win against twelve Y the Aliens lol.
Speaking of him, most characters has four levels for quest mode. In his case he has five levels facing everyone. In most of their quest mode they only face the other team. Y the Alien is hands down the best character in the entire game to play as. Do you wanna know why? Y the Alien is fighting in his UFO.
Thus he is the only flying character that's very fast and can easily escape the worst of attacks. Also he has the most powerful special among all the characters. This alien doesn't mess around in combat. There is plenty of vehicular combat games on PlayStation 1 but barely any on Nintendo 64. Surprisingly the controls feels just like some Twisted Metal games on PS1 I'm not kidding.
Very recently I got everything unlocked without cheating on my own. I have trouble wanting to do that for any Twisted Metal games. I like all their quest mode is short but a lot of fun to play. Twisted Metal games has you playing more levels with tough boss fights. Personally I wouldn't mine if this game had those bosses.
Vigilante 8 truly deserves to be called the challenger to the king of car combat. In many ways it is better than Twisted Metal. Let's be honest you could play them both & still have a great time. End of the day they're incredibly different from each other leading up to a different experience entirely. Twisted Metal in my opinion had better endings but some jokes in Vigilante 8's are still funny.
I should mention voice actors aren't that common among N64 games. A lot of games that had them were ported of other games. There wasn't a lot of original games having their own voice acting. This is one of the exceptions still holding up great today. Vigilante 8 is easily the next best thing after Twisted Metal series.
Bonus fact I still don't know if it is even real or a joke or whatever. Supposedly there is a compilation for PS1 with Twisted Metal 1-3 and Vigilante 8. I can't confirm if this was indeed real or not. But it still bags the question why is Vigilante 8 with Twisted Metal!!!. Although Vigilante 8 does make it a much more solid package since TMIII sucks.
I really can't wait to play Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense for many reasons. I hope you guys enjoy my blog and I hope to see all of you later.
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